NO WAR: www.moveon.org
>> welcome to this space, which is for notes from the road, both literal and otherwise. This is a room for thoughts to fly around in. Not picked over words, just excerpts from between song spewage. Not mulled wine, fountain water. I'm doing this in the interest of flow. Feels necessary to me right now. Think I'll be updating it often.
tHanks for coMing iN
--------> nOe Venable
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take my life, a small sip of eternity
this is how the thimble taught the bird to drink
stars will die but oceans live their lives in me
all of my life
all my loves how one by one I drank their names
all our lives like lights upon a single string
in the rain one or another held my hand
all of my life
beloved return me to my innocence
carrying the honey of experience
for the friend I have been missing all of my life
all of my life
take my life and tell it with your laughing words
all of our lives, like feathers on a rising bird
all of the time, I was possessed of all the world
all of my life
horns of life and music in my champing hooves
pound through time and die the way that oceans move
stars will die and none of this is what I love
all of my life
nv 2008
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WHERE CRACKS A SPHERE
It had all been temporary.
The soaked bed, temporary.
The clinging garden, temporary.
The wounding arrow, temporary.
You are a child of the world, she told herself.
Not the lone wave, but a small gulp of ocean.
Not a held breath, but a sip of atmosphere.
(Let three raw winds unbuckle my shoulders,
I’ll twist like a screw, bore out into the night,
where cracks a sphere is born a world
as death turns on the light.)
--nv 2007
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Happy new year. I hope that this note finds you well.
The new year finds me putting the finishing touches on my album. During the past year I've learned how to engineer & record, now I'm learning how to mix. It's kind of a neat process. Every stage of the process brings with it so many new challenges to meet. I feel like I'm making a stew. Just trying to get the right balance of everything and not accidentally poison anybody. ;)
Last night was the first time I had ever listened to the whole thing all the way through. I was interested to discover that it is definitely a night time album. Probably an alone album. And on headphones album. But that might just be me.
It's turned cold here in New York at last after a rather eerie month or so of warm weather. The chill and rain are a relief. The wind is howling outside my window in this crazy way it does, like a giant blowing over the top of the bottle. I think that is what happens... That the buildings outside my window make the mouth of a bottle and then the wind blows across it. It is pitched, like fifteen recorders are all playing at slightly different intervals. I would like to hire them to play on my album. But it is a beauty hard to capture.
I leave you with a poem.
Thanks for reading.
madlove,
nv
~ :: THE BIRDMAN AND THE WINDMAN :: ~
The birdman woke to cries and calls,
oh say, what can the matter be?
The birdman woke and clanged his bells
to see the swallow flying free.
She'd got away! and fluttering,
the birdman's heart spun once around--
in his memory she sat cowering,
she looked so different now.
You'd have thought she had been sleeping
and had just now sparked to life
to see her tiny body
cutting arcs into the sky,
you'd have thought she had been sleeping
only now to come awake
and imagine a heart slit open
and with flowers in the break,
you might think of a leaf's release
the day it finally falls,
you might imagine all of this,
yet not know it at all.
"You'd have thought she had been happy,"
cried the birdman to the rain
"you'd have thought she'd have been grateful
to be safe, to be contained."
Now maybe you are curious
what's happening in her head,
then listen closely to me now
for here is what it is:
"There is a kind of death to meet
if you would come to life
there is a kind of music
you might hear if you are quiet
there is a kind of cradle
that you find in outer space
you never were so vulnerable
you never were so safe."
The windman then takes over here
and he shall end the play
just the windman softly whistling
as he carries her away.
The birdman sighs and shakes his head.
The whole thing is absurd!
You'd sooner try to hold the wind
if you would love a bird.
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hi everyone-- I'm alive and well and living in Brooklyn. March finds me well. Snow has covered the garden. You step outside and go slip sliding down the sidewalks, or sledding in the park. I have always loved winter. It is definitely one of the highlights of living on this coast.
The new album is pretty near completion, though my considerable other commitments at present have made it hard to work on it as much as I'd like. It's just waiting a lot of the time, languishing. I come home from a long day and tumble into it like a beautiful vortex.
Let's see. My main news in addition to record progress is that I'm in school full time. I finally decided it was time to go back and finish my college degree. It's hard right now to balance everything, but I just got to a point where it felt like what I needed to do. I am determined that this will not mean a turning away from music. Actually, it's another step in the direction of building a life in which I can afford to make music on my own terms. It's been such an amazing ride... I never want to stop releasing albums or performing. But it's a challenge to completely make one's living that way. From what I've seen, most everyone ultimately has to find some form of compromise, whether it's by selling their soul to a major label, or selling their waking hours to a temp job, or by working in the granite quarry. It's a challenge to build what feels like a complete life for onesself.
That said, I've been enjoying my classes. It's good to fire up the old circuitry again, learn to think in new ways, let in a lot of new input. It's neat to see how different subjects wend through one another-- evolution has been a theme, stages of life, how people change, loss of innocence, exile from the garden... there are a lot of moments when I find myself thinking, "Hey, I wrote a song about that. So THAT's what other people call it!" It's humbling and interesting to realize the extent to which thought is a matrix, how as artists or scientists or religious thinkers, we are all addressing the same basic themes.
My greatest new passion is playing the cello. I'm completely in love with it and my only regret is not having discovered it sooner. It's very large cumbersome. When I drag it down into the tunnels I have the image of dragging a baby killer whale around by its tail. To play it feels like dancing. ("If you're looking for me, I'll be dancing with my whale...")
The main theme of this past year seems to be that it's never too late to try something new. There's a man in one of my classes who's in his 80s. He needs help getting out of the tiny desks we have to sit in, but other than that, he's perfectly fine. Actually, there's a wide range of ages and people in the class-- some are 18 year olds hitting college for the first time, one woman is older and is an interfaith minister, there's someone from Uganda, and someone from Finland, and a girl wearing a berka.
Well, what else? I wish I could say more about the new record. Unfortunately, it's harder to put words around music... It's meant to be heard, not talked about by me. Todd and I did a session here in New York with drummer Dean Sharp. I'm thrilled about what he added to the songs. It's getting rEALly close now... I hope to have it done in a few months.
I'm looking forward to playing shows again, I can't tell you how much I miss it.
I hope everyone is well.
best,
noe venable
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dear everyone--
Well, first of all, thanks for coming in. I know it's been something of a
ghost town around here lately. I've had a lot to contend with this past
year, and I just felt like I had to put the website on the back burner for
a while. So if you've been coming in hopes of new strawberries and
finding only wilted old lettuce, I'm sorry for that. :) I hope that
wherever and whenever this missive finds you that you are well, warm, and
amongst friends, that life is as good to you as it may be.
Where to begin?
So much has happened. This past year has been cataclysmic for me... Like
a heavy blow to the head. Like getting picked up in a cyclone and carried
off and dropped off in a minefield, with clubs for feet and a blind dog to
guide you. And if that sounds vague, well, consider yourself lucky to
have been spared a description far more verbose and considerably less
coherent, because in the midst of it, I might have written a much more
that would indubitably have said less.
That said, I am now doing much, much better. After a number of months
spent holding off on performing, I'm about to hit the road again for a
west coast tour, this time with singer songwriter Kris Delmhorst. But my
main focus for the past while has been recording... I've got a couple of
records in progress, at least one of which I hope will be ready for
release sometime this year.
The first is a record of songs, including a few that some of you have
heard live and even written to ask about, Prayer 4 Beauty, Swim with Me
(the turtle song is what you've been calling it), Sparrow I will Fly, Ice
Dragons, Into the Wild...
The second project is a concept album-rock?opera-story thing that I've
been conceptualizing for more than a year now but have only just begun
work on in earnest. It's a project very much inspired by nature and the
natural world, & I was lucky enough to be granted a residency to work on
it, which gave me the use of a one room cabin in the Oregon woods for the
month of January. It was an extraordinarily beautiful environment to
compose in, a snow blanketed pristine world of otters, ponderosa pines,
and melting icicles. Which dripped into my writing, I think... It is
definitely a winter album.
Well, once again, thanks for coming in.
I think I will stop here, and hope that the volumes more I'd like to
express in regards to all of this are in the music, and that winged notes
will say them best. There's this red taste in my mouth again that says
better just to sing it, sing all of it. Red melody in the mouth, tongue
unties like a streamer.
MadLove, all! Take good care.
& thank you for visiting.
noe venable
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